CIO — Outsourcing boomed over the last decade. So it's not surprising that a lot of incoming CIOs are inheriting some crummy outsourcing contracts. These deals are potential hornet's nests if not handled quickly and carefully. CIO Executive Council members who have dealt with this issue point to renewed governance and realigned expectations as the key to turning around these situations. They offer the following solutions.

Turn to the Experts

CIOs sometimes don't have staff with the in-house experience needed to easily sort out whether it makes sense to ride out a poorly performing outsourcing contract or move on to a new one. In this situation, turning to a consultant may be the most effective option.

When Lynn Willenbring became CIO of the city of Minneapolis, she recognized that despite the benefits of the current outsourcing contract, it was not being effectively managed and there were ambiguities in its language. She also felt that the in-house IT staff needed to focus more on strategic management and less on dictating the details of how to accomplish each of the vendor's tasks.

To help determine what changes were needed, Willenbring turned to consultants with experience in contract governance to advise her staff on industry best practices. The consultants initially came in to help evaluate whether to stay with the legacy vendor or to issue a new RFP. When the decision came to renegotiate, they became the lead negotiators under city oversight.

Realign Expectations

Not meeting expectations is a common complaint about outsourcing contracts, usually communicated in language such as, "I'm not getting anything I need out of this."

Whether those expectations are for financial gain or for service improvements, the first task for a new CIO who wants to provide a better outsourcing experience is to understand why the organization is outsourcing any part of its IT in the first place, says David Patzwald, CIO of Schneider Electric North America. The complexities of a contract and of user needs are only going to increase over time. Until a company understands what it wants out of the relationship, the vendor is not going to be able to deliver to anyone's satisfaction.

Part of being a good customer is not expecting what you didn't ask for, says Patzwald.

At Freescale Semiconductor, the expectation is that its help desk outsourcing vendor will not only resolve customer problems quickly and fully but do so in a manner that keeps users happy. So new service-level agreements incorporate customer satisfaction survey results: On every call that is taken or handled, the customer can fill out a survey about how the vendor performed.

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